I am currently traveling as a Museum representative on a Travel with the Met program Dukes, Popes & Painters: Lyon to Arles aboard MS AmaDagio. This morning we arrived in Lyon to spend the day before we begin a seven-night cruise along the Saône and Rhône rivers.

Teen Advisory Group Member Karl invites readers to apply Matisse's "non finito" technique to aspects of their own lives.

The Lalibela churches take their form, placement, and orientation from both geological features and structures within the complex.

Zen teaches that enlightenment is achieved through the profound realization that one is already an enlightened being.

Curator Keith Christiansen considers whether the pervasive darkness in two of Caravaggio's late works should be viewed as metaphorical or as an expression of the artist's tortured life.

Audrey, a former member of the Teen Advisory Group, reflects on how her experience in the Met's teen programs has helped her in her college art history studies.

The remains discovered at Hasanlu demonstrate that it was a major local center of commerce and artistic production with close ties to other political and creative centers of the Near East during the early first millennium B.C.

This volume catalogues for the first time more than six hundred bronze and iron objects in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each is illustrated and described and then discussed in terms of its formal and stylistic aspects, cultural background, function, and chronology. Bibliographic citations present comparative material relevant to each object. A distinctive feature of this catalogue is its organization. Within the geographical sections the excavated objects appear first, separated from the unexcavated material that is stylistically attributed to the same area. Extensive cross-referencing within the catalogue entries relates objects that arc formally similar, as well as those that are geographically or culturally associated. The objects presented here have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum over the last century through the Museum's participation in archaeological excavations, by exchange with other institutions, and by purchase or gift. The geographical areas they represent include much of the ancient Near Eastern world: Iran, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. By studying the objects and the commentary offered in this catalogue, the reader may explore ancient cultures and the problems confronting modern archaeology and scholarship.

Finely worked to a resilient consistency from local clays and gravel, the millennia-long endurance of [Nok sculpture] is a testament to the technical ability of their makers.